If you don’t know the names of Bertillon or Lombroso, you will by the time you’ve finished reading this article at the MIT Press Reader by Jessica Helfand about anthropometrics. Here’s a snippet:
The pursuit of human metrics has a rich and fascinating history, dating back to the ancient Greeks, who viewed proportion itself as a physical projection of the harmony of the universe. Idealized proportion was synonymous with beauty, a physical expression of divine benevolence. (“The good, of course, is always beautiful,†wrote Plato, “and the beautiful never lacks proportion.â€) From Dürer to da Vinci, the notion that humans might aspire to a pure and balanced ideal would find expression in everything from the writings of Vitruvius to the gardens of Le Nôtre to the evolution of the humanist alphabet. To the degree that proportion itself was deemed closer to the divine when realized as an expression of balance and geometry, proportion had everything to do with mathematics in general (and the golden section in particular) and found its most profound expression in the realization of the human form.
The author glosses over some of the darkest chapters in anthropometry which have largely resulted in the field becoming just shy of taboo. All I can add is a question. How can you really know whether something is real or not unless you measure it? A priori? Article of faith?
Operationally, zooming out (on any given issue) until universality, self-evident observation, and consensus have all converged is a good place to start.
One can then reason forward jointly from there, taking care to ensure that each of these three properties (universality, self-evidence, and consensus) is preserved at every step, and get pretty good results.
But most people aren’t willing to do that much work. Cherry-picking (to exclude inconvenient facts/viewpoints) is far easier.
Are feelings real?
Steve
I’d go with “Feelings (and thoughts, and emotions) are real, whether or not they reflect reality.”
But any measurement of them is likely to be both noisy and incomplete.
The qualitative measurement (that) is easy.
The quantitative (what)? Not so much.
I’d go with feeling are real but not measurable so they can’t be verified, assessed, or compared with anything. That doesn’t change their reality but it does change the weight they should be given.
I’d go with Feelings was one of the most obnoxious songs ever………